


Burning

by wavewright62



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Angst, F/M, Family Secrets, Pre-Canon, prologue characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-22
Updated: 2016-04-22
Packaged: 2018-06-03 18:39:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6621856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wavewright62/pseuds/wavewright62
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This takes place in Y45, and Ingrid Andersen is mourning her husband Gøran.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burning

It had been a lovely funeral. Everybody not on active duty turned up in their best regalia, for Gøran had been a Founding General. While it was true that Gøran did not die in battle, he was accorded the highest honours. His longboat burned brightly as it floated out of the fjord on the falling tide. Later in the hall, there would be singing, although naturally there would be no aquavit with which to toast his passing.  
  
Ingrid walked away from the wharf slowly. She’d never cared for aquavit back in the old days, and didn’t miss it now. She picked her way carefully through the broken remnants of paving and stones that passed for the streets of Dalsnes these days, that the new recruits were made to carry in and lay as part of their fitness building. Some walked respectfully behind her, others had walked more briskly home, and her eldest grandson supported her arm lightly as he walked beside her.  
  
Forty-five years of privation and sorrow left her face shuttered and expressionless, skin pulled taut over the high cheekbones, sky blue eyes hooded, one nearly blind with a cataract. Her hair was white now instead of blond, and pulled back from her face with a knitted ribbon. The jumper hanging on her slight frame was dyed pale green and knitted with reindeer on the yoke. Ingrid’s younger daughter Gudrun had researched the historic pattern from the days before the reindeer turned into horrors; it was the last sweater Gudrun had knitted before she’d lost an arm in a troll ambush. Over the jumper she wore the battered coat which had once been Berit’s, repaired many times but still serviceable.  
  
They silently passed the sheds. She was still nominally in charge of the spinning and weaving sheds, and sometimes they felt more like home than the cottage she shared with Gøran. Ingrid had parlayed the barely-remembered knowledge from a few hippie craft classes as a girl in Oslo into a small industry. They even had some trade with Iceland now that they’d ventured out from their sheltered little island, calling themselves the centre of the world.  
  
There weren’t many lights at the sheds, and Ingrid knew that most of the workers would have gone to the funeral to honour Gøran. Only some of the young apprentices would be there, practicing their weaving by making bandages. There was always a pressing need for those, and the imperfect technique didn’t matter as long as they stopped the bleeding.  
  
Ingrid felt bone tired, and was glad of her grandson’s support. He wasn’t much taller than she was, but he was sturdy and steady, calm with a piercing intelligence, much like her own. He was in the military, of course, but instead of troll hunting around Dalsnes, he was in military intelligence and always seemed to be abroad now. His father, her eldest son, had died when a Beast whale attacked and sank his ship. When she was the age her grandson was now, Ingrid had marched in demonstrations protesting Norway’s hunting of whales. Too many ironies, too many to count, and she’d never had Gøran’s ability to laugh at them.  
  
Her cottage had been scrubbed clean of the stench of Gøran’s last days, and Gudrun had left a pot of soup on the cookstove for her. Her grandson pressed a cup into her hands and sat her at the table. With a sigh she placed the cup on the table and said, “Leave me. I’ll be fine. You should go and toast your grandfather with the others.”  
  
“I’ll go along shortly and toast Gra- Gøran. He was a fine general and a good man.” Ingrid frowned and looked up at him. He appeared a bit nervous, and he swallowed before continuing, “But the time to toast my _grandfather_ is past. Did he ever know my father?”  
  
She could sense him holding his breath. Time stood still, and in that moment of stillness Ingrid could once again taste the salt on her lips and feel the rocking of Gunnar's boat in the still summer’s twilight. Then time shifted again, the calendar was reset to 0 and she could hear herself wailing in the pouring autumn rain, wailing her sister’s name as she fell to her knees on the wharf. Sølvi alone of Ingrid’s family had made it to Bergen but could go no further, and it was too dangerous to go get her. Aksel tried to stop him, but Gunnar went anyway. Gøran had hoisted her, senseless and soaked through, from the wharf and taken her back to his room. She exhaled slowly. Back in the present, her grandson was still there, watching her.  
  
She turned to him and skewered him with her good eye. “So, that’s what they practice in military _intelligence_ these days.” She turned away from him again. “Too much time has gone by, Trond. The only one who can be hurt by that now is you.”  
  
Trond stared at his grandmother for a long moment, but then gave a small nod as he turned to go. The soup congealed untasted as Ingrid sat at the table and stared at the dying embers. She could taste the salt on her lips and feel the rocking of Gunnar’s boat.

**Author's Note:**

> Trond Andersen has just received his first lesson in the uses of secrets.
> 
> Edit to answer a question: I deleted most of the flashback sequence as clunky, but it had an invented backstory for Ingrid as coming with her boyfriend Gøran up from Oslo to spend the summer holiday at his family's cabin in Dalsnes. Being a bit of a free spirit, she started a fling with local boy Gunnar, with their trysts on his boat. By the time the events of the Prologue took place, Gunnar was a bit conflicted and making himself scarce around Gøran, especially Gøran and Ingrid together.  
> I also went through a few rewrites of what happened to Gunnar after he went to Bergen that last time, some where he lived and some where he died right away, but decided to leave that alone entirely. So, maybe he got attacked by Sølvi the troll, or maybe he couldn't find her and was commandeered for another rescue mission and ended up ravaged by polar bear Beasts, or maybe he ended his days living on his boat with Sølvi and a group of refugees from Bergen. Or not.
> 
> Sometime after I wrote this story, Minna released the family trees of the cast of SSSS. In it, Ingrid was Trond's mother, not his grandmother. Sort of bollixes up this story, but not completely.


End file.
